Email Author P.b. Miller

1995 Stories by P.b. Miller

• Cheap and functional

  published December 28, 1995

  Like a remorseless killer in a grade-Z slasher flick, The Fantasticks keeps coming back. You can strafe it, bomb it, drive it over the edge of a... More >>

• Ho, ho, ho

  published December 21, 1995

  If playwrights and producers would only subscribe to the "Journal of the American Medical Association," they wouldn't have to waste so much time... More >>

• Rug rats' guide to Christmas theater

  published December 14, 1995

  What, the Dickens again at the Dallas Theater Center? You bet your suet pudding. This is DTC's 12th annual production of Dickens' A... More >>

• Deal with the devil

  published November 23, 1995

  Goethe is one of those heavyweight writers (mostly Russian or German) who everyone admires but who no one reads. In fact, in these post-literate... More >>

• Fouled out

  published November 16, 1995

  With Ohio Tip-Off, the Dallas Theater Center takes aim at the merry dance of dreams and commerce that is professional sports. ... More >>

• Class act

  published November 9, 1995

  "Back in the old days," Chuck Carson, MC of the first annual Leon Rabin Awards was saying to a well-coiffed crowd, "Dallasites used to show their... More >>

• Death angel

  published November 2, 1995

  There are as many ways of looking at death as there are ways to die, and eventually we all have to pick the way that suits us best. Spanish... More >>

• Sea of sap

  published October 26, 1995

  Katharine Hepburn took a lot of razzing for repeatedly rasping "The loons! The loons!" in the movie version of On Golden Pond. Insouciant young... More >>

• Cost of living

  published October 19, 1995

  "All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Tolstoy's famous opening lines to Anna Karenina lifted the... More >>

• Three-ring theater

  published October 12, 1995

  You never know what you're going to get when you go on an anti-communist tirade. Take The Invisible Circus. It never would have come into... More >>

• Winnie the wimp

  published October 5, 1995

  Where would children's literature be without the Brits? Fairy tales and other traditional stories aside, it's British writers, most of them... More >>

• For arts sake

  published September 28, 1995

  This production poses for the umpteenth time the hoary philosophical question, "If a tree falls in the woods, and no one hears it, does it make a... More >>

• The plague years

  published September 21, 1995

  Rosanne Rosanna Danna was right. It's always something. Take paranoia. Just when we've learned to stop worrying about the Bomb, the Bug... More >>

• That old rotter

  published September 14, 1995

  If there's one thing audiences won't put up with these days, it's exposition. Like a horny teenager, they want to cut right to the chase. ... More >>

• Half there

  published September 7, 1995

  There are soreheads among us who claim to dislike musicals as a dramatic form because they lack verisimilitude. Orchestral music doesn't well up... More >>

• Golden years

  published August 31, 1995

  Right-thinking people--and Woody Allen agrees with me on this--would much rather live in the 1930s than endure our current decade, if somehow they... More >>

• 11th Street one-acts

  published August 24, 1995

  David Mamet and John Patrick Shanley belong to a select group--playwrights who have had their work interpreted by chick singers with only one name... More >>

• Welcome Home

  published August 17, 1995

  What happened to Stephen Wade should happen to everyone. The young Chicagoan was having a perfectly average early '60s American childhood... More >>

• Out of ashes

  published August 10, 1995

  Imagine for a moment that the good citizens of Austin have Dallas surrounded and are lobbing mortar shells into the streets, gang-raping women,... More >>

• This charming man

  published July 27, 1995

  Editor's note: Beginning this week, P.B. Miller, a longtime Dallas Observer contributor, takes over our regular Stage column. Nora FitzGerald, our... More >>

• Thug life

  published May 25, 1995

  Though Anthony Burgess deplored what he saw as modern society's mechanization of men's souls, he was a bit of a machine himself. During his... More >>

• Weird beards

  published April 6, 1995

  Russian writers get a bad rap. Far from being suicide and samovar-obsessed weird-beards, they are actually rather jolly fellows. ... More >>